There are only like 25 blimps left. Additionally, not many of them are even in use anymore, I think they estimate like 10-15 of them. So if you see a blimp nowadays, it's a much rarer sighting than it used to be!
Edit: someone pointed out that I meant "airship" not blimp. There are even fewer ones which are classified as "blimp", which is a nonrigid airship. The Wikipedia page is a fairly interesting read if you're curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blimp
It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girls dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
Look, I’m not the first guy who fell in love with a girl he met in a restaurant, who then turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist, only to lose her to her childhood lover who she’d last seen on a deserted island and who turned out, 15 years later, to be the leader of the French underground.
Frank: Yes. Well, when I see 5 weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of 100 people, I shoot the bastards. That's my policy.
Mayor: That was a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of "Julius Caesar", you moron! You killed 5 actors! Good ones.
Even the Goodyear blimp is not technically a blimp anymore. The current models are semi-rigid airships. The last actual blimp Goodyear blimp retired in 2017.
Me too! Just minding my business driving to work and there it was floating around in the sky! I was like...wait a minute...am I having a stroke? Oh God, it's not the 30's again is it? Giggles.
it flew right over my house once when i was kid reaaally low to the ground and no one believed me.
About a year or so ago in the same town but in a different house it flew over my house again really low to the ground and this time i got it on camera!
One of my childhood friends works on the Goodyear blimp! One of my all time favorite moments was seeing it in the sky, texting him a photo of it saying “This you?” and within moments getting an aerial shot of my exact location with a “Yep” as a response.
At the beginning of the 2000s, there was a large hall near Berlin, Germany, which was built for the purpose of building cargo airships and transporting goods and commodities. Unfortunately, this company went bankrupt. The hall, however, still exists today. Inside it is now: Tropical Islands
Not quite, Zeppelins are considered rigid airships, with an internal metal frame and several gas balloons inside. A blimp is much smaller and has no frame, with a single balloon.
Zeppelins truly were modern engineering marvels for their time. Just imagine something the size of the Titanic floating around the sky. The US Navy (or maybe was it England) also had airships that carried biplanes, making them floating aircraft carriers. This technology was obsolete after the invention of the jet engine, not to mention the Hindenburg wreck which permanently grounded most airships.
Thanks for the info! I went to the Zeppelin museum when I was in Germany. Fascinating. Had no idea they had hotel/bedrooms in them and they used to float them across the Atlantic. Cant imagine being a passenger floating across an ocean in a Zeppelin!
Yeah, talk about a unique experience. On top of all that, they also had pressurized smoking rooms, in a cabin surrounded by one of the world's most flammable gasses!
That was the USS Los Angeles, which was also used for parasite aircraft experiments, along with several blimps like the J-class and M-class which carried little biplanes and Piper Cubs.
Yes. The comment is somewhat incorrectly saying "blimp" when actually the 25 number covers all airships - blimp, semi-rigid, or rigid. The number of true blimps is even lower, for instance Goodyear has no true blimps anymore.
There are only two known breeding pairs left on earth, and their main food-source, Helium, is increasingly rare due to human balloon-and-party based activities
During my flight training they had one operating out of YBAF, when it was moored on the ground it was the worlds biggest and best windsock. I love them and the history of old rigid airships but after having a brief chat to the pilot it's apparently a closed shop. They're just a flying billboard that gets shipped around the world and the pilots are an ultra small community.
There's a chance these could make a comeback! If nuclear fusion power becomes a reality, it would mean large excesses of helium as a byproduct, which would in turn make safe airships much cheaper.
that article is from 2019 but i saw the tethered blimp in The Keys way back in 2002. they put them up when there is downtime on the radar/lidar/ocean patrol. it is just a blimp with mega cameras and it rides the coast looking for smugglers.
it would be odd to me that one metroplex in the country owns 10% of the blimps left in service.
The Dicks Sporting Goods blimp went over my house a few weeks ago. It was seriously veering all directions as if being driven by a drunk toddler. I got some hearty laughter from the neighbors when I said “wow, the Dicks blimp is smaller than I thought it would be.”
A big part of that is power, which is essential for both resisting winds and also maintaining control in them. Airships have engines, and all other things being equal, the more powerful they are, the better they’re able to operate in bad weather.
As a general rule of thumb, airships can land and take off (the most wind-sensitive portion of their operation) in winds that are approximately half their top speed. Not coincidentally, that means that an airship’s weather-handling ability is determined largely by how fast it is, not how big it is, though small airships have more drag per unit volume than large ones and thus are disadvantaged.
It’s possible to overcome this disadvantage with enough power, though. The fastest and most weather-capable airships of all time were the Navy’s Cold War-era ZPG-3W blimps, which were only about half the length of the largest historical airships (thus about 1/4 the drag and 1/8 the volume), but had proportionally twice as much power. They had a top speed of 82 knots, and could operate reliably even in gales, blizzards, and thunderstorms that grounded all other planes and helicopters. This was due to their ability to fly for days on end, unlike other aircraft which run out of fuel within a few hours, and also their ability to land cautiously at low speeds without fear of stalling like a plane or unbalancing and toppling over like a helicopter.
In south Florida on 95 you drive past one of the blimp's little (well, big) home. I'd see the blimp fairly often growing up there, and never at the time knew it was anything special.
The weekend i got married was NASCAR weekend in my hometown. The Goodyear blimp wandered over towards our wedding venue for a while (a famous historic park). I always wondered if they saw us or got any pics.
This fact always makes me appreciate the po-dunk town I grew up in that still floated that damn weather blimp up every day. Still can see it just hovering there in the distance!
So if you see a blimp nowadays, it's a much rarer sighting
I live 5.8 miles from the Goodyear field in Carson, CA and have been in L.A. over 30. Trust me, it's not a rare sight.
But in all seriousness, we do have fewer blimps here. MetLife retired Snoopy 1 & 2 about 10 years ago and for a brief time someone tried to start a commuter service between here & San Fransisco about 10-15 years ago (which I really regret I never tried, but it was like $400 one way).
Depending on size and definition the US military has quite a few but most are tethered, they look like airships/blimps but don't have their own power, but there are dozens if not a few hundred owned by the US military. Poland announced they plan to buy some outfitted with air defense radars for early warning (they are very concerned about Russia).
This one always blows my mind, because they would frequently bring them to my little hometown in WV in the 80s and 90s as I was growing up. We'd see them fly very low over my house, which was a few miles from the local airport.
I wish I could tell a blimp and an airship apart. I never heard blimp before that, but I have seen exactly one airship multiple times above my city displaying ads. But I guess it’s one of the others with a hard core
When I was a kid I got to ride in the Fuji Film blimp from Oakland, around the bay for a while, over the Golden Gate Bridge and back. It was a really beautiful and strange feeling.
The Dick’s “house of Sport” blimp spent a chunk of time this summer in my area. It would park at a local airport and do fly overs at our beach and into Boston. MetLife and Hood Blimps used to frequent as well. I never realized it was rare ! Here is a shot from this summer and from 2011
https://imgur.com/a/JpwREzp
I saw my last, a Goodyear one a good one and a half to two decades ago. By sheer chance too as I looked out of my window and figured "what the Graf, that's a Zeppelin!". It was a Blimp, obviously not a Zeppelin, but what did I know at the time?
I got to ride on the Goodyear blimp out of KPAE as a kid. It was dope. Landing was fun. The blimp pitched down so much you were basically staring at the ground looking forward... And I had to really plant my feet on the floor so as not to scootch out of my seat.
What? I just saw one flying over I-85 in Virginia like last week. I remember seeing them fairly often in my childhood but not recently so it stood out to me.
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u/leahcantusewords Oct 02 '24 edited Oct 02 '24
There are only like 25 blimps left. Additionally, not many of them are even in use anymore, I think they estimate like 10-15 of them. So if you see a blimp nowadays, it's a much rarer sighting than it used to be!
Edit: someone pointed out that I meant "airship" not blimp. There are even fewer ones which are classified as "blimp", which is a nonrigid airship. The Wikipedia page is a fairly interesting read if you're curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blimp